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Sinking Island

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Trying out this 2007 detective story for the first time.

I love the detective mechanics, combining clues, the acting is good, the story is interesting. Even the endless screens of walking back and forth are beautiful (if worthless).

There are a few things that are making this a huge pain in the ass to play.

* Navigation. Finding my way around is a fucking nightmare. It took me a half an hour of trying to find the kitchen before I gave up and looked for a walkthrough. Turns out the second floor isn't connected to itself. The heliport does not seem to exist at all, yet critical characters are said to be hiding there. Every room takes up 5 different screens, and you can't see someone sitting 10 feet away unless you find the correct screen to locate them. There is no up, down, north, or south, just "click here to go somewhere else ... maybe". Has anyone charted out some kind of map to this place?

* The Adventure Game Pixel Hunt Problem. No key to highlight interactive elements? Oh look, that patch of sand, which appears identical to every other patch of sand, is actually different from every other patch of sand and contains critical information, yet there's no way for me to know this unless I drag my cursor over every pixel in the game. What the fuck.

* The Adventure Game Interaction Problem. I need graphite powder. I have a graphite pencil. There is no evident way to do anything with it. I can't just step on it to grind the graphite into powder, because of course I can't. I'm sure I have to find the one cat hair mustache pixel in the 2000 rooms in the game to push the pencil against, but jesus damn it.

As with 100% of bad adventure games everywhere, it's not about solving the problem or figuring things out, but having the very pieces be impossible to find.

Explorerbc? IHaveHugeNick? cvv? Should I just say "fuck it" and use a walkthrough? Or better yet just watch it on youtube since that would be no different? Or are there tools to make the experience not terrible?
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Trying out this 2007 detective story for the first time.

I love the detective mechanics, combining clues, the acting is good, the story is interesting. Even the endless screens of walking back and forth are beautiful (if worthless).

There are a few things that are making this a huge pain in the ass to play.

* Navigation. Finding my way around is a fucking nightmare. It took me a half an hour of trying to find the kitchen before I gave up and looked for a walkthrough. Turns out the second floor isn't connected to itself. The heliport does not seem to exist at all, yet critical characters are said to be hiding there. Every room takes up 5 different screens, and you can't see someone sitting 10 feet away unless you find the correct screen to locate them. There is no up, down, north, or south, just "click here to go somewhere else ... maybe". Has anyone charted out some kind of map to this place?

* The Adventure Game Pixel Hunt Problem. No key to highlight interactive elements? Oh look, that patch of sand, which appears identical to every other patch of sand, is actually different from every other patch of sand and contains critical information, yet there's no way for me to know this unless I drag my cursor over every pixel in the game. What the fuck.

* The Adventure Game Interaction Problem. I need graphite powder. I have a graphite pencil. There is no evident way to do anything with it. I can't just step on it to grind the graphite into powder, because of course I can't. I'm sure I have to find the one cat hair mustache pixel in the 2000 rooms in the game to push the pencil against, but jesus damn it.

As with 100% of bad adventure games everywhere, it's not about solving the problem or figuring things out, but having the very pieces be impossible to find.

Explorerbc? IHaveHugeNick? cvv? Should I just say "fuck it" and use a walkthrough? Or better yet just watch it on youtube since that would be no different? Or are there tools to make the experience not terrible?

Yeah if I remember correctly I ended up using walkthrough for some of the pixel hunts.
 

Explorerbc

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Nov 22, 2012
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It's been years since I played it but I don't remember navigation being that bad.

As for the other two complaints they sound like pretty standard features of the genre. I always considered highlighting objects cheating. Maybe you just don't like adventure games that much :P

I also think the game has a timer because you have to solve the mystery before the island sinks but I'm not sure.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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It's been years since I played it but I don't remember navigation being that bad.

As for the other two complaints they sound like pretty standard features of the genre. I always considered highlighting objects cheating. Maybe you just don't like adventure games that much :P

I also think the game has a timer because you have to solve the mystery before the island sinks but I'm not sure.

Normally I'd agree, but this game had some nasty pixel hunts man. I still remember one around sandy area that gave me absolute nightmares.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Maybe you just don't like adventure games that much :P
I definitely hate the ones that are arbitrary in the worst way. If I can be standing three feet from a gold-spangled throne room door and have no idea it's there because of a bad camera, or if I can't break an egg with a hammer but have to trick a goat into stepping on it instead, you can bet I don't like it. This game has already shown that it is exactly that arbitrary. :argh:

I wasn't kidding when I said the heliport apparently doesn't exist ... I step off the elevator into a small reception hallway, the game says I am now in "HELIPORT", and the obvious door leads into "HELIPORT LOUNGES" which are evidently not connected to a heliport (yes, I searched them. "Heliport Lounges" consist of about a dozen empty screens, covering two floors, that go nowhere). The only other way out of that entrance hall leads to "GARDEN" (which has absolutely nothing in it). I searched the area for like 20 minutes ... (at the end of which I got a phone call telling me to hurry up. Twist the fucking knife.) Yet the witness I want to talk to is listed as being in the heliport. Where is the fucking gold spangled throne room door - if a helicopter can land on it I should be able to fucking see it, but this game is about a detective who literally cannot see what is in front of his face. Mind you, my character arrived on a fucking helicopter, so he damn well knows where it is. I sure wish he'd tell me. And I already mentioned not being able to get graphite from a goddamn graphite pencil I'm holding in my hand. Rationality does not exist in this game. What's left? Methodically brute force clicking every point in every room, and as we all know there are 2000 unnecessary rooms in this game. No, I don't like it. :argh:

As for putting a fucking time limit on this stupidity, where the only way to proceed is to mouse trace every pixel whether it looks like anything or not ... jesus fucking christ.
It's a real shame that I like the detective mechanics so much - I want very much to play that game. But this other one is garbage.
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Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Check out the Asylum thread for a rant from me and Darth Roxor on some of this crap.

There's a reason Adventure Games died once, yet some people can't seem to grasp that.
 

Explorerbc

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I seem to remember this game was not very object-centric because the focus had moved from inventory puzzles to the detective mechanics. That lead to a lot of areas being relatively empty which I guess is good cause it means you won't have to interact with a lot of stuff, but it might also trick your brain into assuming some screens that seemingly have nothing of interest in them are not attention worthy. And then when you find something obscure in them you'll go into paranoid mode and check every corner of every random empty hallway. Or sometimes an illogical solution will make you doubt the puzzle integrity of the entire game, leading you to ignore a simple answer believing it must be something more complicated. See how interesting adventure games are for behavioral analysis ? :M

As for the pencil
according to the walkthrough there should be a pencil sharpener somewhere nearby, which sounds pretty fair :P
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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I seem to remember this game was not very object-centric because the focus had moved from inventory puzzles to the detective mechanics.
Yeah. I was actually excited when I started playing, the first half hour I was only building an "inventory" of clues and conversations.

Then I ended up in the workshop and the main character decided to pick up a blowtorch and carry it around in his pocket, because eh, you never know when a blowtorch will come in handy.
That was certainly ... a moment.
rating_prosper.png
 
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IHaveHugeNick

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Yeah, my memory of Sinking Island was that it had beautiful art, really cool premise and setting, a lot of interesting mechanics, but ultimately was a disappointment due to shitty core point&click gameplay. One of those games that just missed it's chance for greatness because developers couldn't get the basics right.
 

Barbarian

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I played this nearly 10 years ago so my memory of it might be a bit fuzzy, but I remember a cool premise and setting with shitty pixel hunting and a very lame ending. One that nearly ruined the game, so rushed and sill
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Gave up and uninstalled. All I want is a walkthrough that tells me where all the tiny clicky unnoticeable pixels are so I can gather clues and figure things out, but every walkthrough says shit like "first collect the scrap of clothing which belongs to Joe the Murderer". @#)(% Time to just move on and play better games.
 

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